The last two weeks of research went well – we collected 15 interviews with ACCA castañeros, and spent the last several days focusing simply on collecting non-ACCA interviews, which were obviously harder. We spent many early mornings at government buildings where castañeros had to come to, and with the help of Carlos, who worked at ACCA yet knew most of the castañeros, we were able to collect a total of 10 non-ACCA interviews, which we felt sufficient to give balace to our ACCA interviews. We now get to spend several weeks compiling the data, organizing it into an effective manner, drawing conclusions, and also translate our findings into Spanish so ACCA can more effectively use the data and conclusions we have.

…is currently in Dr. Forsyth’s 15 degree heat block! Today’s work involves a transformation of the final, catalytically dead active site into bacteria, and then confirmation work can begin on the clones I’ve created. With luck, I can identify putative clones to send off for DNA sequencing by monday, and begin overexpressions next week! Since so much of molecular biology involves waiting (an overnight wait here, three hours there), to maximize my time, I’ve had a side project or two involving SUMO-targeted ubiquitin ligases, which are moving quite quickly. In other news, keeping an organized lab notebook is a more frustrating endeavor than even the most intractable experiment.